But that doesn't seem to be working for general video files, so I'm guessing that, as the name of the XML element implies, it's specific to DVD .iso files ?

I can work around the "folder.jpg" requirement if I absolutely have to but:

a. I have other media players besides XBMC accessing this collection that also rely on "folder.jpg" and need the image to be at a far smaller resolution than what I want to use with XBMC,
so I would prefer use a different filename altogether for XBMC and leave the existing folder.jpg images as they are.

b. I just can't believe that a system as powerful as XBMC does NOT offer a way to override the default file names. There MUST be a way to do that, surely?

I have a very big collection of movies with cover art, fan art and metadata all carefully hand picked and set exactly how I like it in the folders. So I WANT XBMC to use my local stuff before it even thinks about going to the internet for anything.

Yes, I'm a control freak I like my stuff the way I like it.

Can anybody offer advice on this? I've done a lot of searching and digging around but I can't seem to solve this.

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I agree that folder.jpg should have been enough. Unfortunately, generating all possible case differences that folk may use is not trivial, so instead of attempting to generate them all, we specify some semi-sensible ones and are done.

Most folk don't (and shouldn't need to) play with advancedsettings.xml anyway, and fewer again wish to get rid of folder.jpg.

What I actually meant was that the whole thing could be a lot simpler because in the context of this particular feature all you actually need to do is reduced EVERYTHING to lower case before you compare file names and THEN match if that tag is set in the advanced settings.

In other words your code should actually just ignore case completely in this particular situation because in this specific scenario, given this specific context, case is irrelevant to the task at hand.

If I want "folder.jpg" to be ignored, I want every variant of that file name to be ignored, so you don't need to get involved in any case differences at all in this case. All that needs to happen is that EVERY variant of "folder.jpg" in your filter must get removed / ignored.

I should also point out that you shouldn't be too quick to assume that most people don't want to search for other file names and don't want to ignore folder.jpg.

Based on the considerable amount of Googling and reading of articles related to XBMC scraping, library preparation, library management and artwork management that I've done in the last 2 weeks, I can safely say that there are actually far more people out there that probably WOULD like to configure these things than you might think, but don't know how.

I'm a senior level dev who has been doing this my whole life and isn't afraid to get down and dirty to make systems do what I want and I really did struggle to figure out how to do this initially. It wasn't obvious.

Your help with this was crucial to my understanding of what was going on and how to make this work. Which is why I've taken the time to update the Wiki with a verbose explanation of how it all works.